You can now turn your favourite music downloads into playable records made from materials you have lying around the house.

Amanda Ghassaei, 24, from San Francisco has created the world's first laser-cut wooden records using songs from Radiohead and Joy Division.

And the software engineer has made the instructions available to download, making it possible to create your own at home.

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Software engineer Amanda Ghassaei has created a way of creating wooden records using laser cutters. She turned MP3 downloads into waveforms and then used the lasers to cut these waveforms into the wood.

The grooves in Ghassaei's wooden records are twice as thick as vinyl records because the laser's resolution is larger than the vinyl presses. The tracks still play but it means that only three minutes of a song can fit onto the side of a record. It also means the quality isn't as good as vinyl

HOW IS IT DONE?

Amanda turns her MP3 audio files into waveforms.

These digital waveforms are then converted into a PDF to become what's called 'vector cutting paths.'

The paths are cut into the wooden record using lasers; this creates the 'shape' of the song onto the surface of the wood.

The needles on the record player pick up vibrations created by grooves (pictured) and patterns created by the lasers.

Because the resolution of the laser is
thicker than the vinyl record presses the grooves
are twice as large as they would be on a vinyl record.

This means the quality isn't as good
on a wooden record as on a vinyl, and the song fades to a scratch as you
get to the centre of the record.

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Because the resolution of the laser is thicker than the vinyl record presses so Ghassaei had to make the grooves twice as larger as they would be on a vinyl record.

This means that a wooden record can only fit around three minutes of song onto one side, and this means the song becomes more distorted as the needle moves towards the centre of the record because the sampling rate decreases.

Ghassaei explains that if
people don't have a laser cutter, they could try a CNC mill or a CNC razor blade paper cutter.

The laser cutter cutting the grooves into the surface of the wooden record. It follows vector cutting paths created by the waveforms from digital audio files. Engineer Ghassaei has said that a CNC mill cutter is an alternative cutting device

Before cutting the grooves into wood, software engineer experimented with acrylic and paper. This was done to test the laser cutting thickness and test the quality of sound produced from different materials.

She said: 'For me, the most interesting part of publishing these projects is to see where other people take them, and the 3-D printed records were just a little too difficult for an average person to experiment with.'

'I’m hoping that people will download my code and make their own records, or make something I haven’t even thought of yet.'

'Some songs are better suited for this process, songs that are very full in the lower to mid range, but also very sparse overall are best.'

'Idioteque by Radiohead was a great example of this, it has very strong low to mid tones with minimal backing synthetic drums.'

'What I really want to do next is get some 12″ wood rounds, the kind with a live, rough edge and cut some records right into the rings of the tree.'

Ghassaei is a software engineer at Instructables. She has put step-by-step instructions on the site, including file downloads.